“On its surface, the new proposal looks like an effort to shift U.S. immigration toward high-skilled workers... [but] many smart, talented people come to work in the U.S. without many financial resources. Instead of dollars in the bank, their true asset is their human capital...

From the Right

The right supports restricting benefits for immigrants, but some question whether this rule is the best way to accomplish that.

“The centuries-old public-charge principle is not a moral critique. A foreigner with a sixth-grade education and a family of five may be a wonderful human being, a loving husband and father, a hard worker, and a fervent Christian — but... he is unlikely to be able to feed his children without help from the government. For our fellow citizens, such assistance is justified... But what justification can there be for admitting people from abroad who can’t pay their own way?...

“There are hundreds of millions of people abroad who want to move here, and however many of them we decide to accept, we should at least make sure they can pay their own bills... The level of immigration certainly won’t decrease [as a result of this rule], because the waiting lists are so long that anyone barred from immigrating would simply be replaced by the next person in line.”